Urbin Report

Friday, July 07, 2006

The French government has been plunged into embarrassment by the revelation that its intelligence agents interrogated six French citizens inside the US detention camp at Guantanamo Bay.

Defence lawyers said the trial of the six men on terrorist charges, which began in Paris on Monday, had been seriously compromised. They said the French authorities had previously refused to admit that the six had been interrogated by French counter-terrorism agents at the detention centre in Cuba.

The newspaper Libération yesterday published a confidential diplomatic telegram from the French embassy in Washington to Paris in April 2002, which made it clear that French agents had questioned the men in the US camp the previous month. France has always challenged the legality of the camp and has - until now - refused to admit that it had interrogated its own citizens there.

The French Foreign Ministry implicitly admitted yesterday that the telegram was genuine, but insisted that the meetings were normal "consular visits" to "citizens in trouble abroad". This failed to explain the presence of agents from the Diréction Génerale de la Sécurité Extérieure (DGSE) and Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), the French equivalents of MI6 and M15.